Google Summer of Code/Wrap-up Report 2009

This was our first year in Google Summer of Code and we were very fortunate to receive nine student slots. We filled them with some great students and are pleased to report that out of the nine projects, eigth were successful. These were:

A translator for Norwegian Bokmål (nb) and Norwegian Nynorsk (nn)

This project was accepted as part of our "adopt a language pair" idea from our ideas page. Some work had already been done on the translator but it was a long way from finished. Kevin Unhammer from the University of Bergen was mentored by Trond Trosterud from the University of Tromsø. The final result after an epic effort is a working translator (indeed the first free software translator for nb-nn) that makes a mistake in only 11 words out of every 100 translated, making using the system for post-edition feasible.

A translator for Swedish (sv) to Danish (da)

Another language pair adoption, Michael Kristensen, who had previously done some work on this translator was mentored by Jacob Nordfalk, the author of our English to Esperanto translator. As there are very few free linguistic resources for Swedish and Danish the work was pretty much started from scratch, although we took great advantage of the Swedish Wiktionary. The translator is only unidirectional from Swedish to Danish and it has an error rate of around 20%.

Trigram part-of-speech tagging

Zaid Md. Abdul Wahab Sheikh was mentored by Felipe Sánchez Martínez to improve our part-of-speech tagging module to use trigrams instead of bigrams. This gives more context for disambiguation, which will hopefully result in a more accurate tagging. The project was successful with all the coding done, including adaptation for target-language mediated training.

Java port of lttoolbox

Raphaël Laurent worked with Sergio Ortiz Rojas to port our lexical processing tools from C++ to Java. This will facilitate the re-use of our software and our extensive repository of morphological analysers. The project was a success, the finite-state compiler works and generates binaries in the same form as the version in C++ making the binary finite-state transducers interchangeable between versions, there are room for speed improvements, currently the Java version runs ~6 times slower than the C++ one.